Moderate Arab States Wary Of Militant Islam

ALGIERS — The nightly scene seems almost medieval: Government troops and armored personnel carriers take up positions on all roads into the capital.

Their mission is to defend Algeria's secular state against a surging tide of militant Islamic fundamentalism.

The invaders at the gates, armed with Korans and Kalashnikovs, are young men and women of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), an outlawed fundamentalist group that has plunged Algeria into violence that already has taken more than 1,000 lives.

Militant Islam, which came to world attention in Iran in 1979 and is now making a sustained bid for power in Algeria, has rapidly evolved into the world's most potent political ideology since communism.

Islam swept out of the Arabian desert 1,300 years ago to conquer an empire that extended from the Pyrenees to the steppes of Central Asia. Today, Islam is again on the offensive, challenging the legitimacy of the modern nation-state in almost every corner of its former domain.

Three key moderate Arab states that have experimented with democratization-Algeria, Egypt and Jordan-are struggling to regain the initiative from well-organized Islamic militants.

The outcome is certain to have an immediate and lasting impact throughout North Africa and the Middle East. The repercussions could dramatically challenge America's basic assumptions about the post-Cold War political equilibrium-but there seems little the West can do other than ride out the tide.

For the West, the issue has sharpened in recent months with the linkage of militant Islam to violence on American soil.

Followers of the radical New Jersey-based Muslim cleric, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, were charged in the World Trade Center bombing in February, and five Sudanese Muslims have been arrested and charged with plotting to bomb UN headquarters, the FBI's office in New York and the tunnels linking Manhattan and New Jersey.

Abdel-Rahman surrendered to U.S. immigration officials in New York Friday after authorities revoked his immigration status.

The worst-case scenario, however, is that Algeria, Egypt and Jordan will fall into the hands of Islamic radicals, joining militant regimes in Iran and the Sudan to form the core of a geopolitical movement that sees the West as the embodiment of all evil. Even if the three states manage to avoid an outright takeover, they may yield so much ground trying to appease the fundamentalists that a revolution becomes moot.

That's why the current battle for Algeria's soul is so pivotal.

Unlike Iran, an insular society with only superficial Western contacts, Algeria has had a deep and extensive involvement with Europe.

After evicting the French in 1962, the culmination of an epic seven-year colonial war that cost more than a million lives, Algeria's prestige among developing nations was unrivaled. Yet even after independence, Algeria maintained strong ties to France. French is Algeria's official second language, but the first among the educated elite.

But Algerian socialism, incubated in the universities of France, has failed miserably, and the implicit message of the FIS is rejection of all things Western.

"No law. No constitution. Only the laws of God and the Koran," is one of its slogans. Its most ardent supporters demand full implementation of the sharia, the Islamic legal code that says a thief should lose his hand and an adulterer should lose his life.

When it became clear the FIS was about to sweep Algeria's first-ever multiparty elections last year, the army stepped in, cancelled the elections, deposed President Chadli Benjedid and appointed a five-man committee to rule by decree.

The country's Westernized elite heaved a sigh of relief-and then set about the awkward task of explaining to themselves why a military coup and martial law were preferable to democratic elections.

"The Islamic movement tried to use democracy to get power," said Muhammed Larbi, an Algiers journalist. "But we know that the moment they get power, they will put a full stop to the (democratization) process. There will be no more political parties, no more elections, no more freedom."

Another argument is that the FIS's success at the polls should be interpreted not as a genuine desire for governance by Islamic law but as a massive protest vote against 30 years of corruption and mismanagement by the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN).

A quick study of the FIS landslide bolsters this theory. Only 58 percent of Algeria's eligible voters took part in the election, and of those, only 43 percent voted for FIS. In addition, FIS lost the support of more than a million voters between the 1990 municipal elections and the 1992 ballot.

But the army's decision to void the election and the emergency government's heavy-handed efforts to crush the FIS have polarized Algierian society and pushed it to the brink of civil war.